"We verified the genocide assumption, on Polish initiative, during preliminary investigation. There are no grounds to assume it. That is my firm conviction," he said to a news conference. "The investigated case did not imply genocide of the Polish nation."
The investigators ascertained the number of involved camp inmates. It slightly exceeded 14,540, of these, 10,700 in Russia and 3,800 in Ukraine. 1,803 inmates died. 22 of the victims have been identified for today. Mr. Savenkov could not say anything about the others' fate.
The Katyn investigation finished, September 21, 2004. The cases of established culprits were dismissed with their death. More than 900 witnesses were tracked down and questioned. Eighteen expert checks studied more than a thousand objects. More than 200 bodies were exhumed.
All surviving persons employed in involved government bodies at the time of the tragedy were questioned.
The investigating team notified Dr. Leon Keres, Poland's deputy top prosecutor and Director of the National Memory Institute, about the finds and conclusions.
The file contains 183 volumes, 116 of these containing top secret information. The other 67 volumes are open to the public, and Russia is ready to offer them to Poland any time, reassured the prosecutor.
The resolution to dismiss the cases also belongs to classified information, he added to explain why he did not mention any culprits' names.
As a protocol signed by Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Poland in 1995 envisages, each of the signatory countries independently investigates crimes perpetrated in its territory. Belarus and Ukraine shared their information with Russia to be used as the Military Prosecutor General's office was summing up its investigation.
After Poland capitulated, early in World War II, more than 14,000 Polish commissioned officers found themselves interned in the USSR, autumn 1939. Nazi aggressors eventually seized the Soviet Union's west. Information about the officers shot by NKVD men in the Katyn wood, 14 kilometers west of Smolensk, was circulated since 1943. A Soviet investigation team of 1944 blamed the massacre on Germans.
